{"id":14604,"date":"2026-03-03T17:01:32","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T22:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14604"},"modified":"2026-03-11T03:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T07:50:08","slug":"irans-liberators-and-their-ledger-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/03\/irans-liberators-and-their-ledger-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran&#8217;s liberators and their ledger books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">L<\/span>et us begin, as one always must with these episodes, by taking the stated justifications at face value\u2014and then, having done so, disposing of them with the contempt they deserve.<\/p>\n<p>We are told that this is a war for freedom. We are told that the Iranian people, rising magnificently in their hundreds of thousands against a theocratic tyranny that has ground their faces in the dust for nearly half a century, required the assistance of cruise missiles and B-2 bombers to complete their emancipation. We are told that Donald Trump woke one morning possessed by a burning solidarity with the workers of Tehran, the students of Isfahan, the women of Qom who had already demonstrated a courage that shames every comfortable Western observer who ever uttered a word in the mullahs&#8217; defence. We are told all of this, and we are expected to nod. But I have a higher opinion of your intelligence. And of the Iranian people&#8217;s, for that matter.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">These campaigns \u2026 are not acts of rescue but acts of power, undertaken because they can be undertaken, justified after the fact with whatever moral vocabulary happens to be available.<\/aside>\n<p>Here is what actually happened, stated with the plainness that the moment demands. The U.S. and Israel started planning and preparing the assault on Iran months ago, and the launch date was decided weeks ago, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/world\/middle-east\/israels-operation-against-iran-was-coordinated-with-us-israeli-official-says-2026-02-28\/\">an Israeli defense official told Reuters<\/a> over the weekend. The negotiations, the back-channel diplomacy, the careful diplomatic theater: All of it was, in the clinical phrase, &#8220;cover.&#8221; The date was chosen. The targets were selected. And then the Iranian working class, in its magnificent, leaderless, economically-driven fury\u2014driven not by ideology but by the price of bread, the collapse of the rial, the simple and non-negotiable demand to live\u2014handed the planners in Tel Aviv and Washington an almost embarrassingly convenient pretext. The people rose. The bombs followed. And we are meant to conclude that these two events are related as cause and effect, as call and response, as the cry of the oppressed and the answer of the liberator.<\/p>\n<p>They are related, to be sure. But not in that way.<\/p>\n<p>Let us talk about money, since that is, in the end, what everything comes down to when the speeches are finished and the interpreters have gone home.<\/p>\n<h4>The aims and the precedents of the war<\/h4>\n<p>Iran sits atop the third- or fourth-largest proven oil reserves on the planet. It controls the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow and absolutely critical bottleneck through which passes roughly a fifth of all the oil traded on Earth. Its economy, for all the damage wrought by decades of sanctions, remains a substantial and potentially enormously lucrative prize\u2014once, that is, the current management is removed and replaced with something more amenable to integration into the dollar-denominated global financial order. The Islamic Republic, for all its manifold and genuine crimes against its own population, represents something that Western capital finds structurally intolerable: a large, resource-rich economy operating outside its orbit, maintaining state control over strategic industries, and refusing to open its books to the International Monetary Fund.<\/p>\n<p>The Revolutionary Guards\u2014the IRGC, those bearded enforcers of theocratic misery\u2014are not merely a military force. They are capitalists. They control telecommunications. They control construction. They control significant portions of the oil sector. They are a specific fraction of the Iranian ruling class\u2014a state-capitalist fraction whose elimination is a precondition for the penetration of international capital into the Iranian market. When an American president calls on IRGC members to lay down their arms, he is not offering them mercy out of humanitarian instinct. He is clearing the board. He is, if you will forgive the vulgarity, making room.<\/p>\n<p>The precedents are not encouraging, and one must be a remarkable specimen of selective amnesia to have failed to notice this.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Demands for bread and dignity can never be served with bombs and death.<\/aside>\n<p>In Iraq, we were promised liberation. And then came the privatisation of state industries, the dismantling of labor protections, the transformation of an oil-rich nation into a playground for contractors \u2014 many of them connected, with a directness that not even the most credulous observer could attribute to coincidence, to the administration conducting the liberation. The Iraqi working-class, which had lived under genuine tyranny, found itself liberated into a new condition: structurally unemployed, exposed to a market it had no preparation to navigate, presided over by a succession of pliant governments whose primary qualification was their willingness to sign the appropriate documents.<\/p>\n<p>In Libya, we were promised a more surgical affair\u2014no boots, just airpower, just the nudge that a brave people needed. The result is a decade and a half of armed factions, open slave markets, and the systematic looting of a country&#8217;s resources by a rotating cast of militias and their foreign backers.<\/p>\n<p>The question\u2014the only serious question\u2014was what would replace them, and in whose interest. And on that question, the record of American-led liberation speaks with a clarity that ought to silence the most enthusiastic hawk. There is a particular kind of bad faith at work in the invocation of the Iranian protests as justification for this bombardment, and I want to name it precisely because it represents the most cynical inversion of solidarity imaginable.<\/p>\n<h4>The Iranian people deserve better<\/h4>\n<p>Those Iranians who took to the streets did so at extraordinary personal risk. They were motivated by economic desperation\u2014by the collapse of a currency that had rendered ordinary life nearly impossible, by a kleptocratic system that funnelled resources upward to the Revolutionary Guard and its associated enterprises while ordinary people chose between heating and eating. This was a working-class uprising in the most elementary sense: people whose material conditions had become intolerable refusing, at last, to tolerate them.<\/p>\n<p>What they were not asking for was to be bombed into liberation by the government of Donald Trump and the administration of Benjamin Netanyahu. The arrogance required to assume otherwise\u2014to take the genuine, indigenous, economically-rooted rage of a people and conscript it as retroactive permission for an operation planned months in advance\u2014is congruent with the entire colonial tradition of speaking for the natives while acting against their interests.<\/p>\n<p>If the United States government had spent a fraction of the resources now expended on &#8220;Operation Epic Fury&#8221;\u2014and I note in passing that the Pentagon&#8217;s talent for naming these adventures has not improved\u2014on, say, lifting the sanctions that contributed to the economic misery driving those protests, we might have a conversation worth having about American sympathy for the Iranian working-class.<\/p>\n<p>Demands for bread and dignity can never be served with bombs and death. It is not the Iranian worker who will see their conditions improve when the dust settles and the reconstruction contracts are signed. It is not the nurse or the teacher or the factory hand whose rial-denominated salary had become a sick joke. It is the Lockheed Martin shareholder. It is the Raytheon board. It is the private equity firm that will move, with admirable swiftness, into the newly opened Iranian market. It is the anti-democratic, anti-worker, and anti-woman Gulf monarchies who will breathe easier with their most capable regional rival reduced to rubble. It is, in short, the same class that always benefits from these episodes, wearing the same flag it always wears while mouthing the same words it always mouths.<\/p>\n<p>The Iranian people deserve better than the monstrous theocracy that has oppressed them. They deserve, equally, better than the liberation now being delivered to them at several thousand feet per second. They deserved, most of all, the right to determine their own future \u2014 which is precisely what this bombardment, whatever its outcome, has now made infinitely more complicated.<\/p>\n<h4>This time the bombs are different<\/h4>\n<p>There is, in the repertoire of imperial apologetics, a familiar rhetorical maneuver: the sudden discovery of humanitarian concern at the precise moment when the cruise missiles are already in the air. One hears, with almost liturgical regularity, that this time the bombs are different, that this time the targets are chosen with moral delicacy, that this time the suffering inflicted will be the regrettable but necessary precondition for a more enlightened order. It is an argument that has survived every empirical refutation not because it is persuasive, but because it is useful. It allows those who have never felt the concussion of an airstrike to speak with solemn authority about its supposed emancipatory potential, and it allows those who profit from the enterprise to clothe their balance sheets in the language of human rights.<\/p>\n<p>We are told, as we have been told before, that the alternative to intervention is indifference\u2014as though the only possible relationship to another people is either to bomb them or to abandon them. This false dilemma is the intellectual refuge of those who cannot imagine solidarity except at the end of a weapons contract. It ignores the far less theatrical but infinitely more difficult work of diplomacy, of economic normalization, of permitting a society to resolve its own contradictions without the helpful acceleration provided by high explosives. The United States has spent decades perfecting the art of making the moderate impossible, and then expressing regret that only extremists remain.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">The United States has spent decades perfecting the art of making the moderate impossible, and then expressing regret that only extremists remain.<\/aside>\n<p>It is worth recalling that the present Iranian state, for all its brutality and clerical absurdity, did not emerge from a vacuum but from a history in which foreign interference played no small part. A population that remembers the overthrow of its elected Mosaddegh-led government at the hands of Western intelligence services is not inclined to interpret incoming missiles as gestures of friendship. One does not have to romanticize the present regime to understand that every bomb dropped in the name of liberation strengthens precisely those factions most adept at presenting themselves as the defenders of national sovereignty. Nothing consolidates a repressive government quite so efficiently as an external enemy obligingly proving its point.<\/p>\n<p>The advocates of this operation speak as though history begins at the moment they clear their throats. They discuss reconstruction before the rubble has settled, speak of markets before the electricity grid has stopped burning, and assure us that prosperity will follow destruction with the punctuality of a scheduled flight. We have heard this prophecy delivered over Baghdad, over Kabul, over Tripoli, each time with the same confidence and each time with the same result: a shattered state, a flourishing black market in weapons, and a generation of young men for whom the only stable employment is participation in the next round of violence. If this is liberation, it is liberation of a peculiarly circular kind.<\/p>\n<p>And so one is left with the conclusion that the most honest description of these campaigns is also the least fashionable: they are not acts of rescue but acts of power, undertaken because they can be undertaken, justified after the fact with whatever moral vocabulary happens to be available. The tragedy is not only the lives lost\u2014though those are tragedy enough\u2014but the corrosion of language itself, the steady degradation of words like freedom, solidarity, and human rights into instruments of persuasion for policies that produce their opposite. The Iranian worker who marched for bread did not ask to become a footnote in someone else\u2019s demonstration of resolve, and the world would be a less dangerous place if we learned, at last, to take such people at their word rather than at our convenience.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"half\" \/>\n<p><small><em>Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/about\/\">About Tempest Collective<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n<p><small>Featured Image credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Iran_and_Iraq_(FL155921323_4712694).jpg\">George Philip &amp; Son Ltd<\/a>; modified by Tempest.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Sirantos Fotopoulos <\/strong>picks apart the reasons for the assault on Iran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":14606,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[34,121,210,434,104],"class_list":["post-14604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","tag-imperialism","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-u-s-imperialism","tag-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Copy-of-tempest_feature_card-44.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}